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2013 Lotus Evora S review notes

2 of 10Since 1959, the Phantom II has held 15 records, including an absolute speed record of 1,606.342 mph.

Photo by Blake Z. Rong

3 of 10This Phantom belonged to VX-4, Air Test and Evaluation Squadron Four, based in Point Mugu, California.

Photo by Blake Z. Rong

4 of 10AIRTEVRON FOUR, known as "The Evaluators," tested guided missiles, AWACS, and Doppler systems.

Photo by Blake Z. Rong

5 of 10VX-4 Evaluators used the logo of the Playboy bunny, perhaps a fitting reflection for a Lotus GT car.

Photo by Blake Z. Rong

6 of 10The Lotus Evora is based on an entirely new platform, the Versatile Vehicle Architecture, or "VVA."

Photo by Blake Z. Rong

7 of 10Optional Design wheels in Gloss Black, 19 inches up front, 20 inches in back. Red calipers are standard on the S.

Photo by Blake Z. Rong

8 of 10The S stands, appropriately, for "supercharged." It also stands for "stonking brilliant."

Photo by Blake Z. Rong

9 of 10The engine is all you see out the back window. So it's got the same rear visibility as an F-4 Phantom II.

Photo by Blake Z. Rong

10 of 10The trappings of luxury. For some drivers, it's all you'll ever need.

Photo by Blake Z. Rong

ASSOCIATE WEST COAST EDITOR BLAKE Z. RONG: I just spent an entire weekend with the 2013 Lotus Evora S; I put close to 500 miles on it. What can you say about a car that shifts your entire paradigm of driving? What can you say about a car that is so fundamentally beyond its competition in what matters -- steering, brakes, handling, dual-purpose comfort, lightweight exhilaration -- but always fails to register as more than a blip?

How do you sufficiently praise a car that deserves to be driven by every man, woman and child (of legal age) on the planet? It would change mankind for the better. Finally, the pretenders in heavy, overpowered sporting machinery could rediscover weight and balance; they would discover steering with so much feeling it could read Braille. One doesn't need 600 twin-turbocharged blow-me-silly-off-the-line acceleration and traction control to prevent the rear wheels from sliding sideways around a Mulholland corner into a pack of Electra Glides. All that power and all that acceleration from just 345 hp -- from a Toyota engine, no less! It's all the power you need, preaches Lotus. If we all drove the Evora, we would learn that glorified racing seats, thin and perfectly bolstered, could be thoroughly acceptable for two-hour highway jaunts to Santa Barbara, Calif. We would rediscover the manual seat and how easy it is to get out of an otherwise cramped car with just a lift of a latch. Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman would be elevated to sainthood. “Simplify, and add lightness” would be tattooed on men, it would be on their forearms and scrawled in Chinese. We would learn to not need, to not want, to eschew rows of buttons and electronics and acronyms galore on our build sheets. And with backseats this useless, we would learn to be more selfish.

The Evora is staid and svelte, purposeful without being obnoxious; its proportions stubby and balanced like a .38 snubnose. Press the unlock button on the key fob, mysteriously unmarked in that quirky British minimalism that invites its own Lucas Electronics jokes. (Our car came with a two-page primer on how to use the car alarm, because some stereotypes are true for a reason.) Climb into the seat, and kink your hips to the right -- despite an all-new platform, the sills intrude halfway into the wheelwells in true Lotus tradition. It's OK, you'll get used to it -- I did. Despite what we can only assume are miles of linkages, the shifter is as precise and mechanical as anything with a transmission tunnel; we only wish it was a bit tighter. The center console shakes when the driver puts the gear knob in reverse. The e-brake handle is untrustworthy. There is no rear visibility. The view out the back is as wide as the ruler with which Chapman's schoolmarms whacked him. Many of the panels feel loose; evidently, “add lightness” doesn't apply to fasteners and rivets.

Lotus must be applauded for attempting to fit two rows of seats -- no matter how inconsequential the rears are -- and a V6 engine between the wheels. It shows. Steering is mellifluous, a delight: traits made apparent before one even leaves the parking lot. There's an elasticity underhand that almost feels alive, like one can feel the steering fluid coursing through its little valves and hoses. Forget the electrics. There is nothing else like it today.

Get to Malibu's mountain roads and the car just gives and gives and gives -- turn out of a corner, whale on the throttle and feel the torque propelling toward the next one, as fast as its little heart can go. There's absolutely no drama in the corners. The brakes are powerful, linear, never trying to be racecar-firm, which in turn makes them liveable. The car grips with tenacity, the traction control barely flitting an electronic eye -- it's nearly impossible to overcook a corner because the car simply reacts with the line, not to it. Unlike, say, a Porsche, it doesn't body slam physics into submission. It doesn't need to. It simply goes exactly where you want it.

For nearly everyone, it may just be all the car you ever need.

As it goes, the Evora S starts at $78,600. At our sticker price of $92,530, our car is not cheap; perhaps more dangerously, it positions itself into some extravagant territory. BMW M6s will smoke it off the line. Porsche Boxsters are weakened without their requisite $15,000 in options. A Jaguar F-Type V8 S is the hottest new car this year; its owners will pay double the valet charge to park it outside the door at the nearest “Club Rehab.”

I'm sure the future of Lotus is murky: with its strange Malaysian ownership, its expired U.S. safety exemptions, and in the case of the Evora S, its overly stretched ambitions against the corporate dollars of Porsche, Jaguar, BMW and Mercedes-Benz, the mere fact that it has persevered for this long indicates that it's held afloat by shoestring, pluck, and the remnants of Chapman's charisma. The Evora is in a long line of Lotus' attempt at grand tourers against this respectable class, starting with the 1974 Elite and ending as recently as “Zany” Dany Bahar's ambitious five-car plan to transform Lotus into the Stephen Baldwin of motoring. Fragility, wonky interiors, and reliability nightmares dragged from the depths of history are why Lotuses have seldom garnered the cachet of anything else equally expensive, a notion that damns Lotus to pure novelty. These are cars for nerds, not night clubbers.

We should be OK with this. Because the Lotus religion is intoxicating, a breath of old-time fire-branding carried forth from an era when its philosophy was commonplace. How else would we elevate Colin Chapman to sainthood? What was so revelatory about his message, one that makes absolutely common sense? Simplify. Add lightness. It's literally the simplest statement one can make -- and as we all know, all water runs downhill. In fact, I think I shall get the message on my shoulder as a tattoo. In Chinese.

WEST COAST EDITOR MARK VAUGHN: As with all things in life, there is good and bad in the Evora S. Let's get the bad out of the way first.

Ergonomics: The thing is nearly impossible to get into or out of. It's almost as bad as the Elise, which was perfect for legless height-challenged gymnasts but anyone taller than a Hobbit suffered. It's like getting into a race car except there's no upper roll bar to grab and swing from. Rear vision is atrocious, especially if you have to back out of a parking space (which is something people have to do, Lotus). This one has a rearview camera but it's not as wide an angle as most other rearview cameras, so you have to creep slowly out and hope someone honks at you before you hear the sickening crunch of composites and metal.

Fit and/or Finish: Once inside, it smells like a surfboard shop from the '70s; all those “composites” are still curing. I like that smell, though. Maybe it's like a cheap fiberglass sailboat from the '70s. Or a sailboat full of surfboards. And flimsy? Move the shifter into reverse and the whole center console moves with it. I could fix this problem with a couple shelf brackets from Home Despot but you'd expect Lotus to have already figured this out. The audio system doesn't seem to have an off button, though Blake claims to have found it (there was no owners manual in the car, probably because my journalist colleagues steal them and sell them on eBay!) so I had to just turn the volume all the way down. Likewise, there was no 12-volt power source I could find anywhere (turns out it is forward of the console hidden behind virtually everything; I found it while looking for the rear hatch release, another thing Blake found). There is a USB connector in the glove box. But go ahead and try to figure out how the glove box opens. Give up? There's a dubiously labeled button on the dash. With the car they included a four-page section of the owners' manual in PDF form that covered the key fob operation. But think about that for a minute: the key fob alone requires four pages to describe! The section included this necessary tidbit: hit the middle button on the fob to unlock the car then you have 40 seconds to start it with the key, after which it assumes it's being stolen and disarms the engine. It has been thus on Lotii for generations.

Engaging the clutch is easy enough, but the throws are longer than I'd have expected. As each gear engages and the clutch comes all the way out, you hear a mechanical clatter that you wouldn't expect in such an expensive car. Might be the throw-out bearing or the transmission or something.

But I can live with all of that.

Because once you turn the steering wheel and go through a corner, all is forgotten and forgiven. This car is genetically evolved to turn. There is no better canyon carver in the world than this. At least not that I remember. Old favorites from the mid-'90s like the BMW M3, Porsche 991 911 and Mazda RX-7 have either gone away or been dulled down to the point of numbness. If I was in the market for a fun sports car and I had $80,000 to spend I'd get this before I got a Porsche. That's right, I said it. Unless it was a Cayman R, which they don't make anymore, and even then it'd be a tough choice.

It sticks and sticks and sticks. You keep turning the wheel expecting something terrible to happen and it never happens. At least nothing terrible. I'd say that a very slight understeer is its initial response. It feels just a little prone to the front wheels sliding before the rears. But that can be switched around easily enough by switching off the traction control and giving it more throttle, whereupon the rears will start to slide around. So maybe it's perfectly balanced, though I think it might be just a tad front-prone.

The Evora S is configured exactly as you would configure a car for road holding. The 3.5-liter V6 sits rear-midship, transversely mounted and powering the rear wheels. The aluminum spaceframe is light and strong. What more do you want for light, nimble, responsive handling? This is the car. Short of a Ferrari 458 Italia, McLaren MP4-12C or, uh, that might be everything, I'd get this. And this is almost as much fun as the Ferrari or the McLaren and for a lot less money.

Yes, I love this car. Yes, I forgive all of its sins. No, I have not considered the long-term ownership pains that may be lurking out there.

Drive one and you will echo an actual 11-year-old passenger: “This is the best car ever! This is the best car ever! This is the best car ever!” and “When I'm old enough to drive, assuming they don't having flying jet cars, I'm going to get one of these!”